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The Neon Show

Siddhartha Ahluwalia

Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journey from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys. 

Hence was born the Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes. 

We welcome you to our journey to understand what goes behind building a super successful company. Every episode is done with a very selfish motive, that I and Nansi should come out as a better entrepreneur and professional after absorbing the learnings. 


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  • 21 episodes
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  • S1 · E389
    Thursday · 50 min

    The AI Moat Everyone is Ignoring | Phalgun Kompalli, Founder UpGrad and Bodhium Labs

    When brands can't figure out how LLMs are ranking them, what do they do? upGrad raised close to $800M, made year long online degrees mainstream in India when everyone said it wasn't possible, and in the process became a trusted brand in Indian education. Phalgun Kompalli is the co-founder of upGrad. Now, on his second founder journey, he is helping brands become visible to AI. In this episode, Phalgun shares why he chose to build an AI company, how Bodhium Labs helps brands influence LLMs, why lazy marketing is dead and why AI services can be more defensible than AI products. He also shares hard-won lessons from upGrad, from expanding into too many markets at once, to hiring far too fast, to discovering that a highly valuable brand can be worth nothing to a customer. 00:00 Founding UpGrad 02:55 Why We Bet on LLMs 06:35 The GEO Moat 10:18 Inside the LLM 12:07 Why Services Won Early 13:35 Building an AI Research Lab 18:46 Why India Sells Differently 22:11 From Consultant to Founder 26:50 The Early Hiring Lessons 26:55 International Expansion Mistakes 27:47 The EdTech Boom and Bust 31:12 How We Found Product-Market Fit 32:59 Supply Before Demand 34:58 Differentiation Is Not Enough 36:29 Borrowing Trust to Scale 38:01 Why Offline Still Matters 40:55 Why Cambridge Lost to MICA 45:33 Raising the First Big Round 46:42 The Pain of Starting Again 48:31 The Future of AI + Education ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E388
    August 22 · 59 min

    Anthropic & OpenAI Have Changed What Moving Fast Means | Krishna M, Elevation Capital

    When frontier labs can build everything, when moving fast doesn't mean what it used to, and when what was impossible can now be done in days, what do you build and how do you build it? Krishna M is an AI Partner at Elevation Capital. He has seen the 0-to-1 journey twice as a founder and has also experienced what large-scale building looks like at tech giants like Meta and Cohesity. In this episode, we discuss why a founder's fearlessness and ambition will define the destiny of the company far more than technical skills. Krishna shares how Indian founders have come a long way and now build like they know no fear. We then explore how OpenAI and Anthropic have changed what it takes to build startups, and what founder traits are needed to create outlier companies in this era. Watch this episode to understand the new definition of startup speed and what to build when frontier labs can build entire product categories themselves. 01:00 From 2x Founder to AI Investor 03:37 Why Bet on the US-India Corridor 07:07 Can Indian Founders Build Giants? 10:13 What Makes Krishna Bet on a Founder? 12:33 The Founder Traits That Matter in AI 14:18 Why Speed Is the New GTM 17:52 The New AI Founder 19:13 How Krishna Builds Conviction 23:26 Why Elevation Bet on Portkey 28:20 How Elevation Evaluates AI Startups 31:17 The AI Security Opportunity 32:04 Your PMF Can Die in a Quarter 32:57 Why Open Source Still Matters 34:11 India's Infrastructure Advantage 36:51 Where the Next AI Opportunities Are 41:35 What Matters Beyond Revenue 43:36 Why India + US Is a Powerful Combination 44:59 What Cohesity Taught Him About Scale 47:13 Selling Data to Broke Professors 50:18 Why Two Weeks in SF Won't Work 52:06 Fundraising Trap Founders Miss 56:47 Outliers Aren't Well-Rounded 58:49 "We're Wrong More Than We're Right" ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E387
    August 14 · 1 hr 7 min

    ChatGPT Killed My $50M ARR Business Overnight | Swapnil Jain Observe Al

    Observe AI raised $125M from SoftBank at an $850M valuation, went on to cross $50M ARR, and worked with some of the world's largest enterprises. But after 10 months everything changed. From a growth stage startup, Observe became an early stage startup, not because they did anything wrong, but because world changed forever very fast. In this episode, Swapnil, Founder & CEO of Observe AI candidly shares what it takes to rebuild a company after you have already built it, why changing people and culture are harder than changing the product, why today's AI winners could disappear as the technology stack changes, and why he thinks we are still in the first innings of AI. This conversation is as much about AI as it is about a founder's drive to win. Chapter Markers 00:00 ChatGPT Made Our $850M Startup Irrelevant 00:38 From SaaS to AI Agents 04:30 Growing Fast, But Also Dying 07:36 Why VCs Bet $200M+ on Observe 09:26 FOMO Made Me a Founder 13:30 We Had Users, But No Buyers 15:27 Why BPOs Were the Wrong Market 17:26 “I’ll Never Sell in India” 22:30 YC Made Me Think Bigger 27:22 From $1M to $50M ARR 30:13 Building AI Before ChatGPT 31:11 The Birth of Observe 2.0 32:18 When ChatGPT Changed Everything 33:15 When AI Agents Take Over 34:58 Rebuilding a $50M ARR Product 35:47 When Co-Founders Leave 38:50 Will AI Actually Kill Support Jobs? 43:51 “AI ARR Is Not Real” 45:45 Most Pre-AI Companies Are Bloated 47:34 Learning GTM by Doing It 51:24 Changing Product Is The Easy Part 58:29 Why Voice AI Is Just the Beginning 01:01:25 The Founder Playbook 01:04:10 What Makes a Great Product? 01:05:37 “I’m Here to Win” ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E386
    August 7 · 58 min

    The Al Lab Founder Who Sees The Future First | Karan Goel, Founder & CEO of Cartesia

    Karan is the co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, an AI model lab building the next generation of real-time voice intelligence. In this episode, Karan explains what all goes into building an AI Lab company; from massive datasets to pre-training to post-training to inference engines, plus a heavy dose of relentless evaluation, and obsession with every layer of the stack. We also discuss why existing AI benchmarks are not very helpful, why latency is voice AI’s biggest enemy, and why maintaining context across long conversations is one of the hardest unsolved problems. Apart from the cutting edge tech, this conversation explores Karan’s journey from researcher to founder, building Cartesia with a five-person founding team, raising capital, and realizing why first-time founders waste years focusing on things that ultimately don’t matter. If you want a glimpse into the future of AI, watch this episode. 00:00 Trailer 01:35 From DPS to Stanford to Cartesia 02:35 From Counter-Strike to AI 04:28 Another Research Paper Wasn’t Enough 06:48 The Story Behind “Cartesia” 07:17 Building a Company With Five Technical Founders 09:55 From Research Project to Startup 13:54 Cartesia’s Audacious Vision for 2035 15:07 What It Takes to Build an AI Model Company 18:55 Why Faster AI Doesn’t Have to Be Worse 24:12 AI Still Has a Memory Problem 27:14 Why Context Builds Trust 27:50 Will AI Replace Entire Account Teams? 29:16 Hold Music Is Now a Salesman 30:30 Designing AI That Feels Personal 31:31 Building With Cartesia 34:48 Voice AI’s Enemy #1: Latency 38:50 Why AI Labs See the Future First 41:32 Finding Product Market Fit 45:34 Great Products Don’t Need Much Marketing 48:12 Very Few Things Matter 52:26 How Big Can Voice AI Get 55:53 Fundraising And Mission 58:15 What Cartesia Is Ultimately Building ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E385
    July 31 · 1 hr 18 min

    Is Your Startup Model Proof? Vijay Krishnan Turing Founder & CTO On What Startups Should Build to Win

    What if the company quietly making OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta's models smarter was founded in India? Turing is one of the companies shaping how AI is advancing. It started in 2018 as a talent platform that found the top 1% of the world's engineers, became a unicorn in 2021, and then made a bet almost nobody understood at the time. In early 2022, long before ChatGPT existed, Turing began helping OpenAI improve its models by feeding human expertise directly into training. Today its network of more than four million vetted engineers and domain experts powers the post-training and evaluation work behind the frontier labs, and the company crossed roughly 300 million dollars in revenue while staying profitable, at a 2.2 billion dollar valuation. Vijay Krishnan is the co-founder and CTO. He was an NLP researcher at Stanford back when almost no one believed that predicting the next word could ever turn into reasoning, and he explains why running a modern model company without human-in-the-loop data is like entering a race with three tyres instead of four. He walks through how a model is actually taught to use software like Salesforce, why coding became the beachhead for every lab, and what changed for Turing the moment Scale AI was absorbed into Meta. The conversation then turns to the question every founder is now asked in the room. What is your moat against Claude? Vijay's answer is to go deeper than the frontier labs can reach, into the outcome you own and the context that lives inside an enterprise. If you are excited about how AI actually gets built, who really trains the models, and how to build a company that survives the labs, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 02:20 - The Indian company quietly behind OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic 04:50 - How Turing went from a talent platform to a unicorn to an AI research partner 08:20 - The bet nobody understood 11:50 - Why a model company without human data is "racing on three tyres" 15:50 - Why coding became the beachhead for every frontier lab 19:50 - What changed for Turing the day Meta bought Scale AI 23:50 - "What is your moat against Claude?" 29:50 - Will AI create more lawyers, not fewer? 34:50 - The teams where engineers haven't written code in six months 39:50 - 16% of the Philippines' GDP is under threat from AI? 43:50 - How you actually teach a model to use Salesforce 49:50 - How robots are taught real-world work 54:50 - Why million-dollar researcher packages are breaking startup hiring 59:50 - The one kind of AI company that gets stronger as the models improve 1:04:50 - Product vs. services, and the trap that quietly kills AI startups ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E384
    July 28 · 54 min

    How 1% Stay Rich - What India's Richest Families Do With Their Money That 99% Don't | Rohit Sarin, Client Associates

    How do India's wealthiest families actually manage their money, and why does the man who looks after roughly ₹50,000 crore of it own zero stocks himself? Rohit Sarin is the co-founder of Client Associates, which he started in 2002 as India's first multi-family office and has grown into the largest in the country, managing around ₹50,000 crore for more than 1,100 wealthy families. The firm acts as a personal CFO for a family's entire wealth, doing for a household what a finance chief does for a company. He built it the hard way. He left a senior banking career at Deutsche Bank and Kotak, walked away from a full salary into a negative net worth, and took no salary in the first year so every rupee could go into building revenue. The firm's first working machine was an old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction. His most contrarian view is about how ordinary Indians treat the markets. He believes trading is a zero-sum game, and the data backs him. A SEBI study found that 93 per cent of individual F&O traders lost money over three years, worth more than ₹1.8 lakh crore, with only about one per cent earning a meaningful profit. Rohit made money on seven of ten trades and still ended underwater because the three losses wiped out all seven gains, so he closed his demat account entirely. He reads the AI boom the same way, as a bubble much like the dot-com era where a rare Amazon survives, and points to Byju's as a reminder of what happens when growth runs ahead of discipline. What the rich do differently is stay patient. They spend on their needs and rarely on their wants, and their real goal is to stay rich across generations rather than to get rich quickly. His own line for it is that wealth is a gift given by the impatient to the patient. He is equally clear that this is India's century, that the country has just crossed the income level where consumption compounds, and that the next ten years may be its best for anyone who starts investing early. He lays it all out in his book, Unlocking Wealth: Secrets to Getting Rich at Any Age. If you are excited about how India's richest families think about money and where India's next decade is headed, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:50 - The personal CFO for India's richest families 03:50 - Quitting a full salary for a negative net worth 05:20 - The old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction 06:50 - The first clients and the two crore bar he borrowed from Merrill 09:20 - How many dollar-millionaires India really has 11:50 - The income level where a country's wealth suddenly compounds 14:20 - What is really driving India's wealth creation 16:50 - How old-money families decide who controls the wealth 19:50 - The tech gap that changed who leads a family office 22:50 - Is the AI boom just the dotcom bubble again 26:50 - Why he is telling family offices to sit out AI for now 30:50 - The asset classes the ultra-rich actually hold 33:50 - Why the rich are moving money beyond India 37:50 - The one thing the ultra-rich do that the 99% do not 41:50 - His relationship with wealth, and needs versus wants 44:50 - Advice to first-generation founders who just got rich 48:50 - Why this is India's century and its best decade 52:50 - 93% lose money trading, and the demat account he closed 55:50 - The book he wrote for every young Indian 57:50 - Rapid fire: the best investment he has ever made ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E383
    July 24 · 1 hr 11 min

    Why Even With Great Products AI Startups Lose with 3x Founder Mahesh Ram, ex-Zoom AI

    What does a founder learn from watching the CEO of a 32 billion dollar company make his biggest AI bets from the inside? Mahesh Ram has built and sold three companies. Thomson Reuters acquired his first, GlobalEnglish went to Pearson after teaching English to more than ten million people at companies like IBM and HP, and Solvvy, one of the first conversational AI companies, was bought by Zoom in 2022. He then spent two and a half years heading AI products at Zoom, sitting beside founder Eric Yuan as the company raced Microsoft into the AI era. In this conversation, Mahesh takes apart the three decisions that put Zoom ahead. Eric refused to charge for AI Companion because he believed everyone in the world should have AI, he publicly promised to never train models on customer data; and he built a model-agnostic layer instead of betting the company on any single lab. Zoom shipped weeks before Microsoft Copilot. Mahesh also shares the operating habits that made it possible, from the five-part rule Eric demands on every decision to the radical transparency that turned his own team into owners. He is just as direct about the question every founder now asks: whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the model companies cannot see the hundreds of custom applications running quietly inside every enterprise, so the durable business is the one that owns the messy, multi-party workflows they will never touch. On the wider fear that AI will kill SaaS, he thinks the shift is real but that Silicon Valley badly overestimates how fast it arrives, which leaves a huge opening for founders willing to go out and become the educators their market trusts. He closes on what he has learned selling three companies, why the best ones are bought and never sold, and the community of Indian origin founders he now runs that grew from three hundred people to more than two thousand in a single year. If you are excited about building enduring AI and software companies, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:27 - The three time founder who keeps destroying complexity 03:08 - Two billion people learning English with no teacher 04:45 - Building conversational AI before anyone knew what AI was 07:21 - How Zoom came to acquire Solvvy 11:08 - Working with Eric Yuan, a true force of nature 13:43 - The three bold AI bets that beat Microsoft to market 15:09 - Why Eric made Zoom's AI free and refused to touch your data 17:29 - The five part rule Eric demands on every decision 21:25 - Radical transparency: share everything except one thing 23:32 - What Mahesh would build differently today 29:05 - The moat question: how do you survive OpenAI and Anthropic 35:33 - What Claude and OpenAI can never see inside a company 41:01 - Will AI kill SaaS? And why Silicon Valley is too early 42:25 - Become the educator: the biggest opening for founders 45:39 - The Indian founder community that 10x'd in a year 52:43 - Where the founder DNA actually came from 1:00:42 - Why he has no regrets building Solvvy too early 1:01:57 - What actually gets a startup acquired 1:05:14 - Why you keep the acquisition circle very tight 1:07:47 - The real job in enterprise sales: get your buyer promoted ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E382
    July 21 · 1 hr 16 min

    The #1 Mistake Killing B2B Startups | Arun Penmetsa, Storm Ventures

    Can the biggest AI labs simply walk into any market and replace the software companies already sitting there? Storm Ventures has spent 26 years building an answer for B2B founders. The firm has made close to 200 investments, backed 11 unicorns, and produced some of the cleanest enterprise exits in Silicon Valley, from AirGap Networks selling to Zscaler to earlier winners like Marketo and MobileIron. Its portfolio today runs from Tekion in automotive retail to Atomicwork in IT service management, Krisp in voice AI, and Synthpop in healthcare. Arun Penmetsa is a Partner at the firm. He built enterprise software at Oracle and Google before moving into venture, and he now leads Storm's work in AI, security, and digital health. In this conversation, he is unusually specific about how the decisions actually get made. He meets ten to twelve founders every week; the entire partnership makes only six to eight investments a year, and the single filter he trusts most is urgency. If a buyer can comfortably wait six to twelve months, the pain is not real, and the company is already in trouble. Arun is direct about the question every AI founder now gets asked, which is whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the foundation model companies will own a handful of core verticals and leave the rest, so the durable business is the one that owns the full stack between the model and the interface and delivers a real outcome inside law, healthcare, construction, or a market as unglamorous as convenience retail. He also lays out where he is placing his next bets, from physical AI and humanoid robots that can retool an assembly line on the fly to vertical companies like Tote that rebuild the software running gas stations and corner stores, where a single day of downtime can cost an owner tens of thousands of dollars. If you are excited about building enduring B2B and AI companies, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:21 - The 26-year-old B2B fund behind AirGapp, Marketo and Tekion 02:47 - The patterns Storm has seen repeat across 200 investments 05:37 - What actually drove seven clean exits 06:37 - The airgap story: the agentless bet that Zscaler bought 13:10 - The one signal Arun trusts more than pedigree 14:37 - Where the moats survive once the models get this good 18:01 - Why Storm backed Atomicwork against ServiceNow 20:00 - Two weeks to decide: how the fastest deals happen 25:27 - The cold email that gets a venture partner to reply 28:52 - The funnel: 500 founders a year, 6 to 8 checks 35:31 - Why Stanford on the resume buys you nothing here 38:13 - The pattern behind every 4 billion dollar outcome 40:44 - The question every AI founder gets: can OpenAI replace you 46:16 - The mistakes that killed companies Arun believed in 50:14 - The million-dollar wall every B2B founder hits 53:30 - Why buyers have already decided before they call you 58:12 - AI agents that stay on a one-hour insurance call 1:08:33 - Physical AI: assembly lines that rebuild themselves 1:12:39 - Tote: the fuel pump they built to win gas stations ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E381
    July 17 · 58 min

    Gaurav Jain on Building $500M Fund, Missing Ramp and Backing Irrational Founders

    Gaurav Jain has seen more than 10,000 startups, built the world's largest pre-seed fund, backed startups like Gamma, Hightouch and Goldcast and has missed Ramp(you can't be a great investor without having a great anti-portfolio :)) A decade ago, when Gaurav started Afore Capital, pre-seed wasn't even a recognized category. Today, pre-seed is what some of the world's most ambitious startups raise as their very first institutional capital. When Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji started the firm ten years ago, "pre-seed" was almost a slight, a label for founders who couldn't raise a proper seed round. They set out to build the world's largest pre-seed fund anyway, closing $47 million on a $40 million target, and every fund since has closed above plan. Afore now runs more than $500 million across four funds. In this conversation Gaurav shares his journey from Dehradun to Silicon Valley and every lesson learned about backing great startups. Like how being in the very best companies matters more than anything else. He is also convinced that the genuine bottleneck is talent. There is a great deal of money in the world and very few people who can build something truly large, which is why at the earliest stage founders tend to choose their investors as much as investors choose them. If you want to understand how the earliest checks actually get written, and what it really costs to say no, this episode is worth your time. 00:00 - Trailer 01:00 - From Dehradun to Google to starting Afore 02:08 - The Waterloo co-op that talked him out of every job 03:18 - Back when "pre-seed" was an insult 05:44 - When Sequoia said "I guess we're pre-seed investors too" 07:26 - Afore's three products, and the experiments that failed 09:01 - Hightouch was a travel company when they invested 11:02 - Goldcast: no visa, no money, funded anyway 12:07 - The through line is always the team 14:44 - The Ramp miss 17:24 - "Founders pick us more than we pick them" 18:45 - The constraint isn't capital, it's talent 22:24 - The Solana miss, when it was still Loom Protocol 24:46 - Ramp's Super Bowl ad, the buses, his wife's business 25:32 - What he looks for in founders 28:50 - Coachability, happy ears, and the Mom Test 31:28 - The biggest mistake: falling in love with the idea 35:04 - The three things that matter, and "50% of zero is still zero" 39:25 - "100% storytelling, 0% data" 41:25 - Investing in India, and the fear of being dumb capital 44:41 - "Sign the deal before Monday" 47:26 - One engineer now does the job of 20 51:43 - Raising from LPs, the undiscussed part of VC ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E380
    July 14 · 1 hr 7 min

    And How Matic Sold 6000 Robots with Zero Marketing | Navneet Dalal & Mehul Nariyawala

    What does it actually take to build a robot that cleans your home when everyone before has failed? Matic is a home robot that sweeps and mops your floors, navigating entirely with cameras, no LIDAR. It shipped its first unit in 2024 and has since sold 6,000 units at ~2,000 a month, almost entirely by word of mouth. And is now the largest consumer robotics company shipping in the United States. Navneet Dalal (a computer-vision pioneer who co-invented HOG) and Mehul Nariyawala met building Flutter, a gesture-recognition app that became #1 in 72 countries and was acquired by Google, where they then worked on Nest cameras and shipped one of the first deep learning algorithms in the wild. Matic is the company they decided would be their last: they wrote "Not For Sale" on the wall on day one and built it to last 20 to 30 years. Their bet was deliberately contrarian. They chose the "unsexy" floor-cleaning market, a category with a net promoter score of -1 that people keep buying anyway (21 million robot vacuums sold in 2024), because entering an existing market beats creating a new one and because it's the foundation for true indoor autonomy. Then they put roughly $35 million of their own money in, about 70% of their net worth, with no plan B. Along the way they lay out a full worldview: why robotics is 100x harder than software (the demo is only the first 20% of the work); why humanoids doing your chores are still 5 to 20 years away (the data problem), why no consumer hardware sells above $2,000; and the skin-in-the-game philosophy captured by his late father's advice: "Sell your home if you have to, but keep the company alive." If you're excited about how home robots actually get built and what it really takes to bet everything on hard tech, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:08 - When they quit Google to start Matic 03:30 - Solving home cleaning with cameras only — no LIDAR 04:46 - The $35M bet: funding Matic themselves 07:36 - What a "level 5" robot in your home really means 08:00 - Why they started with floor cleaning — on purpose 09:45 - The rule: never create a new market with your first product 10:02 - iPod, iPhone, Tesla — all entered existing markets 11:38 - Why new hardware gives you only one shot 13:02 - "Make something people NEED, not want" 16:25 - Why the demo is only 20% of robotics 18:50 - Teaching a robot like raising a child 21:30 - How far are humanoids from real homes? 22:22 - The data problem: "500 years of driving data a day" 22:56 - 90% in the lab, 60% in the real world 26:49 - Why no consumer device sells above $2,000 27:38 - Would you buy a $10,000 humanoid — for what? 28:47 - "History rhymes": General Magic to the iPhone 29:38 - Earning trust after 20 years of broken robot promises 30:31 - Shipping the first robot 30:45 - 6,000 units, all word of mouth, zero marketing 31:10 - Why they're US-only for now 31:50 - The investors: Sutter Hill to the Collison brothers 33:20 - Two companies, both acquired by Google 35:00 - The Flutter story: #1 app in 72 countries 35:25 - Why nobody believed machine learning worked in 2011 38:40 - Microsoft Kinect: 8 million units in 60 days 40:30 - The Google acquisition — and the $35M number 44:40 - The near-death moment: switching to NVIDIA 53:10 - iRobot's bankruptcy and what it means for Matic 53:55 - The real scale of robotics: 21M robot vacuums a year 57:45 - Putting 70% of their net worth on the line 58:40 - His father's advice: "sell your home, keep the company" ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E379
    July 9 · 1 hr 9 min

    How to Solve AI's Biggest Problem | Atin Sanyal, Galileo

    How do you know whether an AI agent is doing its job or quietly failing in production? Galileo is building the trust layer for AI. Its evaluation and observability platform is how enterprises measure whether the output of an LLM or an agent is good or bad. Galileo started before "LLM" was even a word. When Atin showed his prototype to Stanford's Chris Ré, his own first question was "what is a language model?" Today its customers include Reddit, Airbnb, P&G, Comcast, and six of the Fortune 50. Atin spent a decade in big tech before co-founding Galileo with Vikram Chatterji in early 2021. He worked on the knowledge graphs behind Siri at Apple, then became one of the leads and architects of Michelangelo, Uber's AI platform, that hosts thousands of models across pricing, ETA, and demand. That Uber experience taught him the lesson the whole company is built on; that in AI, observability and evaluation are the real bottleneck, and bad data is catastrophic. As ChatGPT turned every AI output into something a user sees directly, the measurement problem went from academic to mission-critical. So Atin made a contrarian bet: instead of using giant LLMs to judge other LLMs, Galileo built Luna, small 1-3B parameter models that run evals at breakthrough latencies of 100 milliseconds and below. If you are excited about how AI actually gets shipped, trusted, and controlled inside real enterprises, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:14 - From India to Apple, Uber, and Galileo 01:34 - Where the name "Galileo" came from 02:38 - Building Siri's early knowledge graphs at Apple 03:29 - Becoming an architect of Uber's Michelangelo 05:15 - Why every AI output is now mission-critical 06:45 - How Atin and Vikram zeroed in on Galileo 07:42 - "What is a language model?" 09:38 - Building the world's first feature store at Uber 11:27 - Language models and tokens, explained simply 14:19 - Where the observability insight came from 15:53 - Quantifying uncertainty and hallucinations 16:36 - The first customers and first use case 19:15 - How the product evolved from a data scientist tool 23:18 - Why ChatGPT changed everything for Galileo 23:57 - The enterprise AI adoption curve, 2021 to 2026 26:35 - Why they built the Luna model 28:32 - Turning LLM "writers" into "calculators" 28:51 - Attacking the latency problem 31:48 - Luna: the modeling and infrastructure innovation 33:09 - What evals are, and why they blew up 34:26 - The case for small language models 36:58 - What "general reasoning" really means 40:39 - AI usage is exploding — and why that matters 43:08 - Online vs offline: the "it worked on my machine" problem 44:33 - The evals flywheel and evals-driven development 46:56 - Galileo in a nutshell 47:39 - What real agents in production look like today 49:30 - A sales intelligence platform, powered by Galileo 50:47 - The agent control product 52:12 - Building GTM as a hardcore engineer from India 54:43 - Garbage in, garbage out: nailing the ICP 55:42 - How the pitch changed from customer 1 to 20 57:27 - Why Atin switched from CTO to CPO ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E378
    July 7 · 55 min

    Beating SBI, 1% NPAs & India's Massive Loan Gap I Victor Senpaty Co-Founder Propelld

    Who is funding the students that India's banks won't touch? Propelld is one of India's largest education-focused lenders, giving loans to roughly 1.5 lakh students every year — matching SBI — with a team a fraction of the size and no branch network. In a single financial year it now disburses more education loans than SBI did in six years of its history. Victor started Propelld in 2016 with a thesis born out of a Milton Friedman paper: a good student should never have to walk away from a good opportunity just because they don't have the money. Propelld hit its stride by going exactly where traditional lenders refuse to — 70% of its borrowers come from tier-3 cities, a segment banks treat as too risky. Instead of chasing the safe 1% of students at IITs and IIMs, Victor made a bet most lenders never make. He built the ability to underwrite the end-use itself — a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses that measures employability and real ROI. The result: NPAs held at ~1%, roughly one-tenth of what banks see the moment they step outside tier-1. Victor has a clear view of where lending goes next. In a post-LLM world, risk, distribution, and fulfillment get radically more efficient — one person already drives ₹50 crore of disbursal a year, and OPEX is projected to fall toward 2% at ₹6,000 crore AUM. His ranking never changes: NPAs first, unit economics second, growth third. If you are excited about how AI is rebuilding lending — and who gets to dream bigger because of it — this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 00:50 - The two numbers that tell Propelld's story 01:55 - Why 70% of borrowers come from tier-3 cities 02:21 - How NPAs stay at 1% 02:52 - Why education is a great asset class 04:04 - Building a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses 05:31 - End-use control: why an education loan isn't a personal loan 06:27 - Why banks only lend to IITs and IIMs 08:36 - Measuring employability to underwrite the end-use 10:23 - 10 years at the intersection of fintech and edtech 11:46 - Why education financing is only ~5% penetrated 17:53 - Do India's graduate really not get a job? 21:12 - The 8% data point, and quantifying ROI 22:24 - The social mobility no one can price 25:39 - From IIT Madras and a global bank to building Propelld 27:41 - How the post-LLM world rewires lending 30:26 - How fast an institute gets onboarded and a loan disbursed 32:12 - Profitable at a ₹1 lakh ticket size 34:13 - The financials: doubling revenue, holding costs flat to FY30 37:19 - Lending as an ecosystem enabler, not just a loan 39:33 - The most valuable courses in a post-LLM world 41:40 - The bet on arts graduates as coding gets commoditized 43:32 - The Milton Friedman paper that started it all 46:53 - 100 investors, and the few who said yes 48:33 - Co-founding with school friends since class 6 50:24 - Settling disagreements over food and Hampi trips 51:31 - The most common mistake fintech founders make 52:51 - The one metric that ranks above everything: NPAs ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E377
    July 3 · 1 hr 2 min

    Lessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses | Naveen Tewari

    Most founders build one unicorn. Naveen Tewari built two. InMobi started with a simple bet: mobile would become the world's most important computing platform, and advertising could make it free for everyone. Every Indian VC said no. Naveen flew to San Francisco on a maxed-out credit card and returned with a $7 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram. Later came a $200 million investment from Masayoshi Son. Overnight, InMobi became India's first unicorn. Then he did it again. Glance, built quietly inside InMobi over three years, is now one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in the US, with more than 10 million monthly active users in the US. The thesis behind both companies is the same. The world's most powerful technologies, first mobile and now AI, only reach masses when someone figures out how to pay for them. Naveen believes advertising is that mechanism, and that InMobi is uniquely positioned to subsidise AI access at population scale, just as it helped subsidise mobile a decade ago. If you want to understand how one founder from India has quietly helped shape two technology eras, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 00:57 - Why Naveen became a founder 03:26 - How co-founders met and came together 11:33 - The pivot from mKhoj to InMobi 15:02 - Can AI be subsidised for mass consumption? 16:12 - Expanding globally before the US 18:29 - Which industries can delay entry to US market? 20:53 - What is Glance? 23:55 - Incubated within InMobi for 2 years 25:17 - What changes when you face failure in public? 29:10 - How the SoftBank round changed InMobi 32:53 - Maxing out credit cards to pay bills 38:18 - $7Million Kleiner Perkins & Ram Shriram round 43:07 - Hypergrowth journey: Series A to Series C 45:41 - $200 million funding from Masa 53:31 - Change of VC ecosystem in India 54:34 - How building for B2B differs from B2C 58:50 - How AI is changing InMobi and Glance ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E377
    June 30 · 1 hr 20 min

    How to Beat a Competitor With 100x Your Funding | Palash Soni, GoldCast Founder

    How do you get an inbound from OpenAI and Anthropic? Goldcast is the video content platform behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Uber and Airbnb, before it was acquired by Cvent in a nearly $300 million deal earlier this year. Palash Soni (Co-Founder and CEO, Goldcast) joins the Neon Show. Goldcast entered one of the most overfunded categories in SaaS. Hopin alone had raised more than $1 billion. This is the story of the decisions that helped Goldcast survive the category and ultimately become one of the biggest MarTech acquisition stories of the last few years. Enterprise customers are won long before they ever sign a contract. We trace that idea through Goldcast's journey, from landing Drift as its first marquee customer and reaching its first $1 million in ARR, to the relationships that quietly compounded over the years and eventually led to an inbound from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. We discuss how retention has always been MarTech's biggest challenge and why AI doesn't fundamentally change that. And why acquisition, not an IPO, is the most realistic outcome for most companies in the category. This episode is about winning in a market everyone had written off, and the decisions that turned Goldcast into one of the few companies left standing. 00:00 - Trailer 00:36 - How Palash caught the startup bug 05:51 - Meeting the co-founders 08:50 - Fundraising has never been easy for Goldcast 10:36 - How we got a term sheet in 2 days 12:43 - We quit HBS and they became our first customer 18:47 - Customers told us our product looked ugly 19:50 - How Drift founder changed the course of Goldcast 21:44 - When competitors raised $250 million 23:31 - How Goldcast got high-profile angel investors 30:33 - The elevator pitch of Goldcast 31:06 - When companies in your space are crashing 32:36 - Was virtual events even a valid space after COVID? 43:15 - How Goldcast won OpenAI 44:38 - What led to the acquisition 53:33 - One thing Palash would change about the last 5 years 56:58 - Founders should define company values 58:48 - Why we had an unusually large post-sales team 01:01:09 - Retention in MarTech has always been subpar 01:04:36 - Is acquisition the only path for a MarTech company? 01:09:16 - How Goldcast got great logos 01:11:01 - How the three co-founders split roles 01:12:05 - If not acquisition, then what? 01:14:20 - How founders move to higher ACVs 01:16:21 - The ethos of the founding team 01:17:25 - The book that changed me ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E376
    June 26 · 1 hr 22 min

    How 3 Friends From Coimbatore Ended Up Running American TV | The Untold Amagi Story

    Who powers the cloud infrastructure behind NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery, Olympics, and the Super Bowl? Amagi, built out of an office on Bannerghatta Road in Bengaluru. What started there grew into a company that went public at an $825 million valuation and today has a market cap of over $1.3 billion, earns 73% of its revenue from the US, and proved that world-class enterprise technology can be built in India and sold to the world. Co-founders Srividhya Srinivasan and Baskar Subramanian take us back to the days after selling their first startup to a NASDAQ-listed chipmaker, when they landed on an idea almost nobody in India's broadcast industry believed in: regionalizing satellite TV ads. That business grew to ₹180 crore in revenue. Then the founders made a bold call: "Enough of this hardware mess. We'll host only on the cloud." It meant shutting down an 8 year old profitable business to back a cloud platform that was barely making a few crores. That decision transformed Amagi into the company it is today. 18 years later, Amagi went public, as a strong example of building a truly global enterprise software company from India. But the IPO itself was far from an obvious decision. The founders share why going public was the right choice despite not needing capital. This episode will tell you how category-defining companies are built. 00:00 - Trailer 01:00 - How three college kids became founders 04:55 - The startup idea validated by a palmist 07:10 - How founders split roles (w/o designations) 11:04 - What Amagi 2.0 does 14:29 - Bannerghatta Road runs Olympics for the US 15:54 - Only 10% of TV networks are on the cloud 16:50 - Why shut down a profitable business? 21:25 - Why one co-founder moved to the US 28:06 - Did Amagi really need the IPO? 31:10 - What is Amagi 2.0? 36:04 - Selling to the US: then vs. now 40:44 - How NBC signed with Amagi 43:56 - How intent is measured through contracts 46:58 - 5 major decisions that changed Amagi 52:08 - How AI is changing Amagi 57:45 - Being the CTO of a public company 1:02:57 - US vs India Market: US is fast to experiment 1:04:48 - Enterprises Need Human Touch 1:11:12 - Cloud and TV: No one Believed 1:13:34 - What will Happen to Hollywood ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Nansi on: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E377
    June 23 · 1 hr 8 min

    How A 23-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Disrupting India's On-Demand Labor Market | Anjali Sardana, Pronto

    Why did global VCs invest $60M into India's most operationally heavy marketplace problem? The early bet was undoubtedly on the founder, Anjali Sardana. A 23 year old biology graduate from Georgetown University who is today the solo founder of Pronto. The company founded on 2nd April 2024 is at a $200 Million valuation, just a year later and they are growing at god-speed. What began in a single hub in Sector 56, Gurgaon is today 22,000 bookings a day, 5,000+ professionals, and operations across India's biggest cities. But Pronto was never just about convenience. It was built on a belief that India’s home services market is broken not just for customers, but even more so for workers. No income stability. No safety net. No formal identity in the system. Not many individual investors write a $20M cheque. Lachy Groom did, alongside General Catalyst and Gladebrook. One year in, Pronto’s growth explains the conviction. This episode is the story of the chaos, the urgency and the belief behind one of India's fastest moving startups. 00:00 — Trailer 01:32 — What is Pronto? 03:16 — Hiring the first 30 pros in a single day 06:13 — Delivering uniforms in 48 hours 08:02 — Hustling to make the first payroll 09:23 — The first home office 11:28 — Why the customer app is only a nice-to-have 17:18 — How pros are trained 21:11 — How Gurgaon, Mumbai & Bangalore behave differently 29:17 — TAM expands based on ease of access 34:58 — Mission is bringing dignity to formal labour 42:27 — Pronto's 30-year vision 42:48 — How US investors see Indian startups 44:37 — How a ₹400 headhunter brought the first hire 47:05 — Final round interview for Pronto's chief of staff 49:29 — How Anjali hires missionaries 54:31 — One thing Anjali would always do as founder 58:29 — One thing she's most proud of 59:29 — One value Pronto would never compromise on 1:01:44 — A company with urgency as core value 1:03:55 — What needs to change in India for Pronto to succeed? 1:05:18 — How to build a win-win-win business 1:07:40 — Why was this problem not solved yet? 1:09:02 — If Pronto fails, what would be the reason? 1:10:05 — How Anjali spends a day as a solo founder 1:15:30 — One lesson learned the hard way ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund/ X: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Nansi on: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E375
    June 18 · 1 hr 10 min

    Why Coding is the Fastest Path to AGI | Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth

    Who is teaching the world's most powerful AI models to think? Turing is one of the largest data partners to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. At a $2.2 billion valuation it has become one of the most important infrastructure layers in the AGI race. Jonathan Siddharth started Turing in 2018 with a thesis that talent matching is a trillion-dollar problem. Turing reached unicorn status in 2021. Then, in 2022, as the foundation model race accelerated, OpenAI approached Turing to provide coding data for ChatGPT. Jonathan recognised that frontier AI labs faced an enormous bottleneck: high-quality training data and human intelligence at scale. Instead of remaining just a talent marketplace, he made a bet that most unicorn CEOs never make. He built a second business on top of the first and leaned back into his AI research roots. Jonathan has a clear view of what needs to happen before we get to super intelligence. The four keys to unlocking AGI: coding, reasoning, tool use, and multimodality. He believes we solve for those four, and AI can do almost anything a human can do in front of a computer. If you are excited about where the AGI race is heading this episode is for you 00:00 - Trailer 01:06 - What Turing does 05:55 - Why OpenAI reached out to Turing 8:28 - How GPT-3 became ChatGPT 17:54 - How ImageNet breakthrough changed the world 21:12 - The largest provider of coding data to AI labs 24:34 - Four keys to super intelligence 28:45 - Every human will run multiple companies in 10 years 32:27 - Can agents have self-improvement loops? 34:36 - The future of software engineering 36:26 - Agents should create, humans should steer 39:46 - Is the line between products and services companies blurring? 40:42 - How an agent can handle hiring end-to-end 43:36 - Every human can now write software 45:22 - Will workflow SaaS disappear? 47:46 - No fine-tuning vs fine-tuning camps 51:49 - A case study in compute constraints 57:06 - Why the world needs so much compute 1:01:26 - Where Jonathan would invest today 1:03:16 - Where cybersecurity is heading 1:08:31 - How the world will look in 10 years ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E374
    June 11 · 1 hr 31 min

    Questions Every Founder Must Answer Before Taking an Acquisition Offer | Shashank Saxena, VNDLY & Pantomath

    Most AI failures won't come from a bad model. They'll come from bad data. Shashank Saxena spent most of his career on the buying side of enterprise technology before founding VNDLY which was acquired by Workday for $510 million. He then joined Sierra as a Managing Partner before going full time as Co-founder and CEO of Pantomath, a data operations center for enterprises that are betting their future on AI agents. We discuss why data quality is becoming one of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI. An AI agent fed bad data for 12 hours doesn't go rogue. It just makes 12 hours of wrong decisions: rejecting insurance claims, issuing credit cards, or drilling in the wrong location. As more business decisions are delegated to AI systems, companies will need far greater visibility into what is happening across their data infrastructure. Shashank also shares the decisions that led to VNDLY's acquisition, the advice he'd give founders evaluating acquisition offers today, and why a Michael Jordan analogy continues to motivate him as a second-time founder. If you're building enterprise software, selling to large companies, or trying to figure out whether experience is an asset or a liability in the AI era, this episode is for you. 0:00 - Trailer 01:00 - How Shashank became a second-time founder 07:20 - Where Pantomath sits in the data stack 10:55 - How a broken Tableau report turns mission-critical with AI 12:55 - Who Pantomath sells to 15:35 - Solving for a problem that doesn't exist yet 19:03 - How have founder expectations changed today? 20:31 - Series B companies pre- and post-AI 21:26 - The Michael Jordan example 23:57 - How a repeat founder chooses investors 25:10 - What value Snowflake adds as a strategic investor 27:05 - Data is not an open category today 28:34 - The astounding Databricks outcome 29:08 - The reality of the $100 million ARR number 31:48 - Will non-human workers 100x in the next few years? 36:00 - How to protect data in motion 37:26 - How comfortable are we giving full access to agents? 39:47 - Where is automation fastest today? 42:09 - Why entrepreneurs tend to like uncertainty 43:28 - Why Shashank chose to be a founder 45:48 - A customer-driven $510M acquisition 48:32 - Employees vs contractors in any organization 51:22 - Building from Ohio vs the Bay Area 53:14 - Learnings from selling to enterprises 56:31 - How Shashank raised from Tier 1 US VCs 59:19 - Heads down or network as a founder? 1:02:47 - First-time vs second-time founder edge in AI 1:06:22 - Hiring as a repeat founder 1:08:08 - How enterprise sales has changed 1:10:52 - How do you sell for a problem that isn't visible today? 1:12:58 - Best piece of advice 1:16:27 - The only advice for a founder considering M&A 1:21:06 - Position yourself to be capable of taking risks 1:24:51 - What matters to an enterprise buyer? ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E373
    June 9 · 51 min

    94% CAGR: What the Inference Boom means for your AI costs | Vamshi Ambati

    Vamshi Ambati has spent more than two decades in AI, through the symbolic era, statistical era, and the neural wave we're experiencing today. A CMU PhD, founder of LatentStructure and Predera (which was acquired), now an investor at Virama Ventures, he's one of the sharper voices on what's actually happening under the hood of the AI boom. We discuss a simple question: Who wins when models become cheaper and more abundant? And try to answer this by looking at how inference spend v/s compute spend is shifting, and why inference may become the biggest infrastructure opportunity of the next decade.Vamshi explains what actually goes into the cost of a token, why AI is simultaneously getting cheaper and more expensive, and why the inference market alone could reach $1.3 trillion by 2030. If you're building in AI or someone who wants a clear mental model of where this industry is headed, this conversation is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 0:45 - How an AI researcher thinks after 20 years 05:53 - Where enterprise AI adoption is headed 08:35 - Drawing parallels between cloud and AI 11:20 - If building is cheap, what's valuable? 13:37 - Can computing get cheaper? 16:41 - What is inference, really? 22:22 - Why coding and customer support got eaten first? 26:48 - Which technologies are overvalued and undervalued? 29:56 - An accidental entrepreneur's journey 33:15 - Why is healthcare slow to adopt technology? 38:59 - Landing Walmart as a customer 42:36 - Should founders build in services if product isn't visible? 43:47 - Is Palantir a product company or a services company? 44:15 - How to win as a forward-deployed company 46:23 - What it takes to land large enterprise customers 49:20 - Building sales muscles as a technical founder ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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  • S1 · E372
    June 3 · 1 hr 7 min

    This Startup Can End China’s Grip on Global EV Supply Chain | Bhaktha, Chara Tech

    China processes nearly 90% of the world's rare earths. Rare earths are hidden inside everything from EVs and smartphones to fighter jets, making them one of the most critical materials powering the modern economy. When China restricted rare earth exports in April 2025, the world saw the huge risk of depending on a supply chain controlled by a single country. For Bhaktha Keshavachar, however, it was validation of a bet he had made 6 years earlier. After exiting Ezetap, Bhaktha founded Chara Tech to create electric motors that don't need rare earth magnets at all. The journey was anything but easy. Six years of R&D. Investors who didn't understand the problem. Customers who weren't convinced. And a motor technology that engineers had known about for over 200 years but never successfully commercialized at scale. Today, Chara is shipping hundreds of motors, signing major customers, and finding itself at the center of a global geopolitical shift. Bhaktha explains how software became the breakthrough that made rare-earth-free motors practical and what it takes to build a deep tech company long before the market believes the problem exists. If you are interested in building deep tech for the world, this episode is for you. 0:00 - Trailer 01:10 - When China bans rare earth exports 04:15 - How today’s rare earth shortage is like 1970s oil embargo 05:26 - Are rare earths really rare? 07:23 - Why China has a monopoly 11:43 - 3 reasons why Chara was founded 15:11 - How Chara made a 200-year-old technology practical 16:45 - How software protects deep tech startups 18:53 - The conviction to build deep tech in 2016 21:52 - Why electricity is still the biggest opportunity 26:59 - 4+1 technologies every country should possess 28:17 - The story of 6 years in R&D 33:16 - The response from early customers 36:10 - How China’s ban changed Chara’s journey 39:30 - Why Growth-stage fundraising for DeepTech is Hard 44:28 - What India needs to win in deep tech 52:53 - 3 things needed for a deep tech startup 55:10 - Why the wealthy should invest in deep tech 58:00 - Where Chara is today 01:03:47 - Why Intel lost the race it was winning ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund/ X: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Nansi on: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

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